Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 reportedly had a campaign in the works which was cancelled in mid-2017. According to a QA tester working at Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 developer Treyarch, the game’s campaign was scrapped due to the developer wanting to make “too many maps”. It was designed to be a two versus two co-operative race to finish each mission. However it didn’t see the light of day due to Treyarch wanting to add more missions. In the state Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s campaign was in, it had five missions that it could have shipped with if the story was condensed. Evidently this was far from the case.

In addition to this the tester claims that Blackout and Zombies development began in mid-2017 with multiplayer around January. It appears that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s single-player campaign was deemed “too out there” by Activision and cancelled.

“Raven Software has reportedly been tasked with adding a Battle Royale mode to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 to fill the content gap of no campaign,”claimed Call of Duty fan site Charlie Intel. In another post, it states that “Activision believed that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s campaign was ‘too out there’ and ‘outlandish’ and cancelled it to let Treyarch focus on MP [multiplayer] and zombies.”

In our Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 review we stated that despite being a polished effort, the lack of single-player campaign made it a tough consideration. There’s a somewhat half-hearted attempt at this with a feature called Specialist HQ that teaches you how to play as each Specialists, but it basically amounts to training with bots and little else. It’s punctuated with cinematics that delve into some bits of their backstory, but it’s sparse at best. Tragic when you consider the attention to detail given to each Specialist in terms of their character design, ensuring there’s a story waiting to be told.

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